Make mine a cherry

The language genius-bank Language Log has a brilliant post on the snowclone (or perhaps not snowclone) “XXX, call your office”, most specifically relating to Judge Crater, who was D.B. Cooper or Dead Elvis or whoever long before anyone tracked such things. The writer appears to be Benjamin Zimmer, but I’ve gotten a lot of stuff wrong lately, so don’t count on me.

Here is an excerpt:

It’s hard to know when such announcements became common, since they only get referred to in newspaper articles when they’re somehow noteworthy. With the advent of large-venue PA systems (and coin-operated public telephones) around the country, it’s probably safe to say that the “call your office” line could be heard on a regular basis by 1930. That was the year when Joseph Crater, a New York Supreme Court judge, mysteriously disappeared after entering a Manhattan taxi. The case attracted an enormous amount of attention, but Crater was never found. A 1979 Washington Post article recounts the effect of Crater’s disappearance on the national consciousness:

Within mere months of his disappearance he had become part of the national folklore, the subject of scavenger hunts and night club routines — “Judge Crater, call your office.” The phrase “to pull a Crater” entered the idiom. (Washington Post, Aug. 5, 1979 — via Barry Popik)

Other secondary sources back up the popularity of this punchline in the months and years following Crater’s disappearance (Arthur S. Koykka’s Project Remember says “vaudeville routines of the 1930s often included the line”). Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any contemporaneous accounts. The line first starts popping up in the newspaper databases quite suddenly in 1966, when it was revived as a popular bit of graffiti.

Judge Crater, here referred to as the “most missingest man in America” was so famous in his absence, and for so long, that there is an episode of the old Dick Van Dyke Show that hinges on this joke, 30 years after the event.

Anyway, back to the snowclone. This is a Language-Log-originated concept, and a terrific one. Here is the Wikipedia definition, in part:

A snowclone is a type of formula-based cliché which uses an old idiom in a new context. It was originally defined as “a multi-use, customizable, instantly recognizable, time-worn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different jokey variants by lazy journalists and writers.”[1]